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The Marketing Playbook That Grew My App to $13K/month | Starter Story
Where this was said
Engineering as Marketing: The Free Tools Strategy
At 12:05 · chapter starts 10:40
This is the centrepiece of the episode. Bhanu explains that he built approximately 50 free tools — things like a PDF-to-Markdown converter and an AI chatbot name generator — each chosen specifically because the people likely to use it are also potential SiteGPT customers [1] — Bhanu "90% of SiteGPT's Google search traffic comes not from the main product but from ~50 free tools Bhanu built. Each tool targets a low-competi…" 10:35 . He gets around 50,000 clicks from Google per month, and roughly 90% of that traffic is driven by these tools rather than the main product landing pages [2] — Bhanu "60 to 70% of traffic is from Google, and in Google, like almost 90% of Google's traffic is from these free tools that we made." 04:40 . The key insight is alignment: every tool must be adjacent enough to SiteGPT's core offering that the user it attracts is a plausible paying customer. Bhanu then reveals the AI-era advantage: with Cursor, he can now build a new tool in under five minutes by pointing the AI at an existing tool template and specifying the target keyword. What was once a multi-day build is now a lunch-break task.
Bhanu and his team built approximately 50 free tools to attract search traffic, each linked back to SiteGPT.
With AI coding tools like Cursor, Bhanu replicates an existing free tool for a new keyword in under 5 minutes. What used to be a multi-day build is now a lunch-break task.
With AI coding tools like Cursor, Bhanu can now create a new free marketing tool in less than 5 minutes by referencing existing tools.
